2017 in film: Moonlight, #MeToo, and the year everything changed

Cast your mind back if you will to January 2017, a time when Casey Affleck was in the frame to win the best actor Oscar for his turn in Manchester by the Sea.

You may dimly recall that even as he was firming as the unbackable favourite, there was a counter-argument emerging that he should not even be in contention. Why? Because of the resurfacing of sexual harassment allegations that had been brought against him and settled, confidentially and out of court, by the actor and occasional director years earlier.

History records that Affleck did win, which might have made the issue seem a mere skirmish in retrospect were it not for the fact the key film story of 2017 is the issue of sexual harassment. So much so that you have to wonder if he would still win if the awards were handed out today.

Now, the Affleck incident seems the perfect prelude to a year that exists in two parts: the portion before October 5, when the New York Times published an explosive story about the now-disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein; and the post-Weinstein era we now inhabit.

If the Affleck tale is one bookend to that sad and sorry saga, it has belatedly found the other in the form of All the Money in the World.

Ridley Scott's film about the 1973 kidnapping of 16-year-old John Paul Getty III by Italian gangsters and the refusal of his billionaire grandfather to meet their ransom demands would always have demanded attention, simply because it's a Ridley Scott film. But when the prolific 80-year-old director announced on November 9 that he was going to reshoot every scene featuring Kevin Spacey as the old man, replacing the actor (who, like Weinstein, had been accused of serial sexual harassment over a period of many years) with Christopher Plummer, it became a sensation.

The film was already finished. It was due for release in a matter of weeks. He was getting the key cast back together, not dropping Plummer's face in with CGI (as he had done, many years before, with Oliver Reed after the actor died before Gladiator was finished). How was this even possible?

Remarkably, Scott had Mk II of his movie ready to meet its US release date of December 22 (I've seen it already, in fact, and you'll get your chance from January 4). The only casualty was the American Film Institute's AFI Fest, which had been scheduled to close with a screening of the film on November 16. Oh, and Spacey's career, of course. It now lies in tatters, alongside his reputation.

And therein lies the great takeaway of 2017, the proof of just how much of a tectonic shift we have witnessed this year: no matter the putative pulling power of a star, predatory behaviour now represents too great a risk to be tolerated. Sure, there might be moral and ethical reasons to object, but the real line in the sand for Hollywood is the bottom line. If a sleazebag star will keep audiences away, there's no place for a sleazebag star.

For Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World, it was out with Kevin Spacey and in with Christopher Plummer.Photo: AP

There were other stories this year, of course, and one of them sits as a welcome contrast to all the above: the success of Wonder Woman.

Its director Patty Jenkins was the first woman to helm a big-budget superhero movie, and because the film was a critical hit and a box-office smash, others will get a shot - or at least get a shot at getting a shot. That said, with only 7 per cent of Hollywood movies being directed by women in 2016, there's a lot of ground to be made up.

Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, a game changer in so many respects.

Australia isn't much better, although Screen Australia's Gender Matters program is trying to tackle the issue, by demanding two of the four key creative roles on any project seeking funding be occupied by women.

Also striking a blow was Hidden Figures, an uplifting - if rather loose-with-the-facts - story about female mathematicians at NASA and their role in getting American astronauts into space. Scratch that: it was about African-American female mathematicians. Say what? People loved it, and not only African-American women; in Australia alone it took more than $17 million.

Still, this has not been a great year at the box office in Australia. [] As of December 22, it sat at $1.03 billion, around 10 per cent down on the previous year. The optimists might imagine the over-reliance on superhero and fantasy fare is starting to work against the big cinema chains - and there might be something in that, as only five movies this year have cracked the $30 million mark (though The Last Jedi is sure to make that six). In 2016 and 2015 seven films exceeded that figure.

Unfortunately for that theory, the five are Beauty and the Beast (a fairytale), Thor: Ragnarok, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and Wonder Woman (superhero movies) and Despicable Me 3 (an animated sequel). And with Disney poised to swallow Fox - the studio whose arthouse sub-brand Fox Searchlight gives us a good chunk of Hollywood's adult-oriented fare - things are unlikely to get better on that front.

Australian films will end up taking around $50 million this year, double what they did last year but a long way short of the record $88 million in 2015 (the year that gave us Mad Max: Fury Road, The Dressmaker, Oddball, The Water Diviner, Paper Planes and Last Cab to Darwin, each of which topped $7 million).

Sunny Pawar as Saroo in Lion, the most successful Australian movie of the year.

When you factor in Lion's $29 million haul and Red Dog: True Blue's $5.8 million this year (and another $1.5 million last year following its Boxing Day release), it's clear the long-term issues afflicting Australian movies at the box office continue. They struggle to find screens, and as a consequence they struggle to find an audience.

There were some seriously good Australian movies released this year, though you could be forgiven for not having noticed. For my money, Hounds of Love was the best of them - indeed, one of the best films of the year, period - but it took just $210,000. Then again, with its gruelling tale of a Perth couple in the 1980s devoted to abduction, rape and torture, it was never going to be a crowd pleaser, even if it had Stephen Curry and Emma Booth playing brilliantly against type.

Stephen Curry played magnificently against type in Hounds of Love. Photo: John-Paul Horre

There were great films from elsewhere too, of course. At the big-budget end, Dunkirk and Blade Runner 2049 took the notion of immersive cinema to new levels; both demanded to be seen on the biggest screens for the best results. At the low- to mid-budget end, Lady Macbeth, Raw and Nocturama (a festival-only offering that you can now catch on Netflix) showed what could be done with imagination and talent, even on a shoestring.

Asked to nominate their top 10 movies of 2017, our critics and film writers came up with wildly divergent lists, but two films kept cropping up: Get Out and Moonlight. It's interesting that both are African-American stories (as is another favourite, the James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro). But that is where the similarities end.

Andre Holland as Kevin and Trevante Rhodes as Black in Moonlight.

Get Out is a political satire about white-liberal guilt and latent racism, wrapped up in the form of a horror-comedy. Like Hidden Figures, it has been a major crossover success around the world.

Moonlight is an intensely personal coming-of-age and coming-out story. It's political too, of course - in fact radically so given the way it shines a light on the rarely depicted treatment of homosexuality within African American communities. It is brilliant.

Moonlight was only a modest box office performer, but in February it gave us a priceless Oscar moment when, amid much confusion and uncertainty, Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as best picture. Whereupon utter confusion descended as people scurried onstage with the right envelope, inside which was the card that revealed Moonlight was the actual best picture.

PricewaterhouseCoopers accountant Brian Cullinan, left, was more focused on his phone than on making sure Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty got the right envelope. Photo: Matt Sayles

It was accidental TV gold; if you saw that bit of chaos, disappointment and hilarity, it's unlikely you'll ever forget it.

And if you haven't seen Moonlight yet, you should. It's unlikely you'll ever forget this remarkable film either.